Rice is life and we just can't deal with it

With a budget for meals of only P60 per day per inmate, one can get a fairly good idea of the kind of food served at the country's jails, including those in Cebu. For rice alone, surely the inmates are not being served Ganador or some other commercial variety. They have to make do with NFA rice, the kind that government procures cheap.

And in this country, cheap invariably tells on the quality. Yet, in this country, cheap and poor quality NFA rice is getting extremely hard to come by. The warehouses of the National Food Authority are getting stripped bare of stocks. Worse, replenishment does not seem to be forthcoming, at least not in the very immediate future. Pretty soon there will be no more NFA rice to see, much less eat.

In such a scenario, the consequence of this unexplained disappearance will be more direly felt by those living within the confines of jails than in the general population outside them. At least those on the outside do not have the budget for their meals dictated by law. Those on the outside can opt to shift to more expensive commercial varieties, if they can afford them. If their own budgets are tight, they can still choose to make a tradeoff somewhere.

Not so with jail inmates. There is not much room to wriggle around in a P60 budget divided into three meals. If there is no NFA rice, then there is no rice. Used to harsh jail conditions, the inmates may be expected to breeze through the first meal without rice. It is even possible to stretch things a bit to cover the second meal.

But by the third meal without rice, there will only be two kinds of inmates left -those who have fainted, and those who have grown restive. And nothing can make the transition from restiveness to anger quicker than hunger. As the second day lapses into a third, it will not be too farfetched to imagine riots breaking out everywhere.

And yet this should not have happened. The NFA buys rice from overseas, from such countries as Vietnam, India, and China, ironically countries that developed their modern farming strategies from our very own International Rice Research Institute during the Marcos era. There is nothing happening in these countries such as natural calamities that are hampering their production of rice. The problem lies with us. We had to wait before the stocks vanished before thinking of importing.